Today we're looking at the performance of ATI's Radeon X800 XL, X850 XT Platinum Edition, and All-in-Wonder X800 XT graphics cards against that of several competitors. On the AGP front, the cards will go toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT and Ultra. We've also included a handful of PCI Express cards, including a GeForce 6800 GT, and 256 and 512MB flavors of the Radeon X800 XL. If ATI's bridge chip is doing its job properly, there should be little difference between the performance of AGP and PCI Express versions of the Radeon X800 XL.

Thanks to OCZ for providing us with memory for our testing. If you're looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, OCZ's RAM is definitely worth considering.

Also, our test system was powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor's Choice winners in our latest PSU round-up.

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. All of the 3D gaming tests used the highest possible detail image quality settings except where otherwise noted.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.